Adam Lovejoy writes from London: Ah yes, that great feeling you get when you stumble on a porn book at a supermarket.

There I was, yesterday, in my local Waitrose, filling up for the weekend when right beside the pet food section I discovered a shelf with some bestselling titles including 50 Shades Of Grey, a porn volume for people who think about sex a lot but can’t really get any of it. Cunning marketing men have even dubbed it ‘mumporn’, to smooth the edges and imply that it’s a book for progressive minded liberated chicks who like to read about a good shag on a rainy day while the kids are at school and their hubbies are toiling and there’s nothing worthwhile on the box. Mind you, the books – yes, it’s a whole trilogy, in case you don’t know it – were written by a revolting looking woman who obviously knows nothing about getting laid properly. Hence the stupid plot and the appalling sex scenes.

So there I was, holding the first volume of 50 Shades, glancing through the content (‘You’re so moist today, Ms Steele’) and thinking: Well done upmarket Waitrose, the grocery chain for all the family. Widening your horizon, stretching the limits of public tolerance, but in a good way. Mind you, the pet food section could have been better stacked, even at the expense of the bookshelves. My cat Timmy is fussy. He likes a good selection and Waitrose doesn’t offer much in terms of pet food.

In fact, Waitrose doesn’t offer much when it comes to many other things as well, considering that its prices are grotesquely inflated on many of the team. Take its ready meal selection. Most of them are not good, not good at all. Bland and unimaginative. Pricy as well. Could be made much better. And the fruit and veg department needs lots of improvements as well. And the flower selection is not all that great. Not to mention that the corporate types who now run the company have managed to screw up on the design of the place and even the shopping bags that Waitrose was famous for, the ones that you pay for I mean, have become boring and lifeless.

But back to porn. There I was, holding a copy of 50 Shades, wondering what the hell was going on, when I spotted a manager lurking about, pretending to be busy, as managers do. So I went up to him and asked him whose bright idea it was to stock the shelves with porn books? And Andy, as was the name on his lapel, looked unperturbed. Said that it had nothing to do with Waitrose and that it were the ‘buyers’ as he called them who selected the goods for the chain.

Have you read the book, Andy? I asked.

Nope, Andy said, looking confused.

You should give it a go, I said. For the sake of research into what makes your customers tick.

And I left him pondering the unknown. ‘Customers’, ‘tick’, reading a book?

Mind you, the way things are going we might soon see shopping bags in Waitrose and other fine chains with some seriously hot images on them. Porn is good for sales, the thinking goes in the higher echelons of retail trade. Or, as slime advertising execs say, sex sales. It doesn’t, of course, but the legend lives on. In Waitrose of all places as well.

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